Dean's Corner - May Issue

Dear CSSW Community, 

Next week, many of our students will walk across the stage as the 2025 graduates of the Columbia School of Social Work. Our newest graduates will take their knowledge and skills and apply them to promote justice in the professional spaces where they choose to work. Your voices are needed. 

Earning a graduate degree is never easy. These last two years, however, have been exceptionally difficult given the many challenges we have faced in our community, across our country, and around the world. Adding to that, the past few months have presented a blizzard of changes in our environment that have served to elevate feelings of distress, anxiety, and fear among so many. We have reckoned with the loss of federal grant funding for life-saving research; unexpected changes in leadership; and detentions and arrests of students here and nationally – all against the backdrop of a debate on the very essence of higher education and its role in society.   

This season has required me to think about, and to hold in a more intentional way, the many contributions to society that schools like ours make. Graduating students, you are key to solving the complex challenges of the world. The social work values that we hold dear, and strive to live up to, call us to see the humanity in everyone. Keeping humanity front and center means social work professionals advocate for human rights in every respect, working towards a world in which no one is pushed to the margins and all can achieve their full potential. 

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. That includes all of us. Let’s remember that women’s rights are human rights; trans rights are human rights; LGBTQ+ rights are human rights; immigrants’ rights are human rights; disability rights are human rights; elderly rights are human rights; and so much more. We must advocate for those rights and dismantle discrimination in all its forms, building at long last a world free of anti-Asian hate, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and every form of bias across all sectors and strata of society. This is the work; and I am committed to it. 

As always, I am incredibly grateful to all of our dedicated students, faculty and staff, who, in the face of ongoing and previously unimaginable challenges on our campus and across our world, continue to demonstrate and live the values of social work. I look forward to sending off our graduates next week and know they will continue to make our School proud. 

In community, 

Melissa